Ads that influence people to share and buy can usually be summed up in one word: emotional.
In fact, research on advertising (using neuro-imagery scans) has proven that the emotional response to an ad influences consumers’ intention to buy much greater than the ad’s content itself!
One of our favourite reads, Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing notes “Our feeling brain serves as the primary driver of behavior and the seat of our value judgements, while our rational mind acts as a backseat observer that more often than not goes along for the ride.”
Emotionally-charged storytelling causes a rush of dopamine to flood the brain, like a neon sign telling your brain “remember this!” The Ted talk “Storytelling, Psychology and Neuroscience” by Amanda D’Annucci supports this notion – she discusses how storytelling engages the entire brain, including the amygdala, our memory centre. There is no doubt – emotion makes stories stick!
“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” said the famous “Marketoonist” Tom Fishburne. Does it feel like marketing when you watch a poignant advertisement and connect emotionally with the subject?
At Chime, the goal for every campaign we take on is always clear: “Let’s make people feel things.”
We loved seeing comments like “I usually skip advertisements but I had to wait for this one to finish. I’m actually crying, this was beautiful.” on our #ShareBeauty campaign with Shiseido.
Emotional connections happen because we’re human; we’re built for these responses, wired for them, and rely on them to live a rich, meaningful life. Chime continues to see that marketing by appealing to raw and genuine human emotion is essential, smart, and pays off.
Still looking for more data to become a believer? Just take a look at the top brands out there in the market place. The most intimate brands, those with the rare ability to elicit an emotional response in their customer, are better business performers than brands that lack that bond. The Brand Intimacy Report, conducted by brand agency MBLM, found the leaders in that category generated an average of 5% more revenue growth and 11% more profit growth – equal to an average of $33 billion a year in revenue for the top brands, and more than $9 billion in average annual profit. Not only this, but they continue to see that consumers are more willing to pay a premium for highly intimate brands than they are for brands with lower levels of intimacy.
“Intimacy is rare”… – “only a quarter of companies can claim it,” says managing partner at MBLM. “If you have an intimate brand, you are probably performing well.”
The digital age is a new and exciting era for reaching your consumers in a highly targeted way – but just because an ad achieves an impression, does not mean it has made an impact. Something that is top of mind is not the same thing as being close to heart. Developing a new creative concept is an opportunity to create a transfer emotion with your potential customers, because at the end of the day, we buy with our hearts.
The more emotional intelligence a brand has and the more intimate of a connection they are able to nurture with their customers, the better they will do with conversions and ROI. So, it makes perfect sense then, that we help the brands we partner with to leverage storytelling and make an emotional and psychological impact to keep consumers remembering their story, and therefore their brand. We don’t just find ways to make people click, we find ways to make people care.
Interested in developing an emotionally-charged campaign to help your brand stand out and cut through the clutter? We’d love to “Chime together”!
